Quotes About Consciousness

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. It is, as Ruskin says, 'not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.' . . . I have to say the words, describe what I'm seeing. . . . But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.

Every place you injure adds that patch to your consciousness. You grow more alive.

I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness.

Where is privacy, if not in the mind?

sat mindless and eternal on the kitchen floor, stony of head and solemn, playing with my fingers. Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.

From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt—older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.

there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut.

A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: "This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Lick a finger: feel the now.

All right then. Pull yourself together. Is there where I'm spending my life, in the reptile brain, this lamp at the top of the spine like a lighthouse flipping mad beams indiscriminately into the darkness, into the furred thoraxes of moths, onto the backs of leaping fishes and the wrecks of schooners? Come up a level; surface.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness.

From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt - older, closer to death, and wise, grateful for breath.

Somewhere inside his head he's still all there, but moved into a cramped rear apartment overlooking the old brain.

El que no es consciente de su lengua, no encuentra su identidad. La lengua es un importante lugar de encuentro de la identidad.

We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think

WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.1 These are Pascal's words, and it is easy to see how perceptive he was about the virtual nonexistence of the present, consumed as we are by using the past to plan what-comes-next, a moment away or in the distant future. That

This shift from automatic living to awakening parallels Carl Jung's Individuation, Dada Bhagwan's Self-realization, Dr. Abraham Mazlow's Self-Actualization, G.I. Gurdjieff's Self-Work and other related approaches to differentiating the innate being from the unconscious complexes we have mistaken for identity.

This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of.

You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.

A human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange.

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.